Outing the Accidental Authoritarian

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Articles for February 2013

While I oppose most gun control proposals, there is one group of Americans I do believe should be disarmed: federal agents. The use of force by federal agents to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws is one of the major, albeit overlooked, threats to liberty. Too often Americans are victimized by government force simply for engaging in commercial transactions disproved of by Congress and the federal bureaucracy.

For example, the offices of Rawesome Foods in Venice, California, have been repeatedly raided by armed federal and state agents, and Rawesome’s founder, 65-year old James Stewart, has been imprisoned. What heinous crime justified this action? Rawesome sold unpasteurized (raw) milk and cheese to willing customers – in a state where raw milk is legal! You cannot even drink milk from a cow without a federal permit!

It’s critical that people should have a clearer understanding of basic economics. Instead we are culturally indoctrinated with many poorly-founded economic assumptions, which we then carry in our daily lives and straight into the voting booth.

This mal-education is self-serving for those in power positions who prey on elements of our liberty, such as those who benefit from the political-banking nexus.

Of course, this particular problem of mal-education is the byproduct of the quasi-non-consensual, government-run “public” school system — who also directly benefit from such an indoctrination. Granted,high school students barely receive any economic education, but what they do get is an amalgamation of straight neo-Keynesian ideology, an Überber-rudimentary recitation of Paul Samuelson’s views stated in his textbook Economics, overshadowed from sixth grade on with a social studies History interpretation that aggrandizes interventionist economic policy makers and other politically motivated intervention by the political class. History class textbook narratives celebrate the creation of the Fed (to tame the business cycle), the New Deal policies of Hoover and FDR (to rescue us from the inherent derelict nature of the Free Market), and JFK’s great promises, and Johnson’s delivery of them via the “Great Society” (because Americans would otherwise let their fellow man suffer in poverty).

Those in power love a Bogeyman. Bogeymen legitimize the power-grabbing ways of those who gravitate to power positions, and every politician since the beginning of time learned early in their career that their relevance is severely diminished when The People come to realize they don’t really need such middlemen telling them how to run their lives, or confiscating the fruits of their hard work, or generally just getting in the way of ordinary consensual behavior.

And so it is that we come to the Sequester Bogeyman, and how many in the media are either too illiterate to understand what’s being foisted on them, or as is probably more often the case, they are quite willing to be accomplices in positing up the charade because they share the same, busy-body political sentiments.

The Budget Sequester: How Did It Get Here, and What Does It Mean?

The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that a million or so jobs will be lost under a full-scale sequester in 2013 and 2014.

Every day that passes without a deficit-cutting deal makes it more likely that the federal government will be forced into its first “sequester” in nearly 30 years, a problem of politicians’ own making that could suck billions of dollars out of the economy.

Gee. Right out of the gate we’re hit in the nose with an recurrent economic bogeyman. If the government doesn’t spend money that’s cut from the budget, it will not “suck $ billions out of the economy”. What it will do is one of several things:

Leave taxpayers with more of their money. But in the case of the massive deficit spending the current fight is all about, current taxpayers won’t see a dime of benefit from any cuts because we’re talking deficit financing, which leads us to…

Lenders to the U.S. government will be forced to find other investments for their dollars they were using to aid and abet the massive debt load created by voters and politicians in the United States. However, that, too, won’t happen because the Federal Reserve is actually currently purchasing in excess of all newly issued debt with what they call QE III (quantitative easing round 3, which in this case is a fancy way of saying “printing money out of thin air to buy debt instruments with the goal of price-fixing U.S. interest rates. Which leaves us with the real outcome…

Leaving the Federal Reserve with the choice of a) monetizing less U.S. while increasing it’s purchase of other assets (most likely shift to buying more of the existing, outstanding US Treasury debt, although it might push to mortgage debt, etc., keeping alive the Fed’s money printing trend of the last four + years), or b) simply cutting back on the present QE III pace of money printing / price manipulation in general.